The history of state and party institutions is full of constant structuring and restructuring: structures were set up, split, abolished, re-established. By contrast, the last fifteen years of the regime witnessed great stability in this respect. Khrushchev’s disbanding of more than one hundred industrial ministries at the stroke of a pen was the most spectacular anti-bureaucratic initiative – the only one on such a scale. And it is worth repeating that they were all reconstituted in 1965. The institutional problem we are referring to here – a systemic feature in itself- consisted in a kind of incessant tinkering, a form of ‘bureaucratic neurosis’ that the system was cured of only by catching another illness. The administration possessed a lot of weight, became highly influential, and sought to curb the Politburo’s despotic power. The bureaucratic neurosis was a way of evading real reform, on the basis of the idea – dear to Stalin – that all that was needed was to ‘correct’ the administrators.
All this requires some explanation. Tracking the vagaries of the administrative system is no easy task.[1] Despite having been a prime mover in Soviet history, the bureaucracy (and its administrative networks) has been insufficiently examined. Its study takes us to the very heart of the system, revealing that the bureaucracy which ran the state virtually came to own it. Changes in its structure, self-image and status must be examined not only in the framework of administrative history, but also in a political optic, contrary to the widespread view that the chief political features of the system were embodied in the party. Under Stalin, the bureaucracy was already an indispensable co-ruler, but unstable and fragile on account of the relative youth of its structures and the novelty of its tasks. Moreover, its members were ‘suspect’ because Stalin understood and feared its potential for consolidating itself and its thirst for power. The situation changed profoundly in the post-Stalin period: initially still deeply marked by the country’s plebeian and rural traditions, during the 1950s and ’60s the bureaucracy became a fully urban phenomenon in a society that was itself now urbanized. In its upper echelons, it was now a solidly established and firmly entrenched power. This emancipation of the bureaucracy was one of the key features of the whole post-Stalinist period. The state and party bureaucracy put an end to the arbitrary practices that had made its situation so precarious under Stalin. Stalinism was thereby replaced by a fully bureaucratic model that rapidly acquired a quasi-monopoly over all strategic positions of power.
Here we must recall the speed of social change in the 1950s and ’60s and the consequent drastic alteration of the socio-historical landscape. The construction of a still fragile bureaucracy under Stalin, and its consolidation as a monopolistic power structure in the years immediately after his death, occurred in a primarily agrarian society. Its monopolistic position in the state and entrenchment in power preceded the definitive transition to an urban civilization. An old characteristic of Russian history, pointed out by Miliukov and reformulated by Trotsky, was once again replicated here: the establishment of a strong state preceded the development of society and enabled the former to dominate the latter. But the Soviet era also witnessed the converse: successive waves of social development on a grand scale generated new systemic characteristics and a whole series of complex phenomena, which we are seeking to untangle in this book.
The bureaucratic phenomenon would unquestionably become more palpable if we had some idea of its size, internal structure and power. We already know that ascertaining the precise number of people employed by the state and other administrative agencies is not straightforward, since much depended on the criteria used by those who counted them – in particular, the Central Statistical Office. The best data are probably those produced by the census of administrative agencies conducted in 1970. Just reading this material and enumerating its results discloses the complex, tentacular character of the phenomenon. Here we shall simply offer a brief synthesis.
The census focused on the administrative personnel of all state institutions and supplied a breakdown between the various important administrative units, enterprises and organizations. Each republican administration was presented separately, as was local government. This abundance of statistics is mentioned only to remind readers that it does exist.
The Central Statistical Office’s computing centre explained that on this occasion it had included everyone not directly engaged in productive activity. Where there was ambiguity, they had split the difference: for example, an engineer working on the shop floor was not regarded as a member of the administrative personnel; but an engineer who worked in the factory’s administrative office was – unless his job was planning and design work. Auxiliary and service staff were included, albeit in a separate category. Guards were a separate category again, probably because they were better paid than auxiliary staff in the strict sense.
On 15 September 1970 – the date of the census – the total administrative apparatus consisted of some 13,874,200 employees, or 15 per cent of the working population (workers and employees). Top managers (rukovoditeli) and their deputies numbered 4,143,400 (this encompassed all institutions at central, republican and regional levels). The next most important category was that of ‘chief specialists’ and their deputies, containing all the engineers, technicians, agronomists and so on, working in administration: some 2,080,400. Then came engineer-economists, economists and planners: 543,400. The rest were distributed between accountants, statisticians, computer scientists, office employees and auxiliary staff.
One particular type of institution was singled out for separate treatment – namely, central ministries and their equivalents in the republics, as well as the other major agencies of comparable status and importance (state committees). The organizations under them employed the bulk of the country’s working population – 49,708,377 workers and employees. Administering all these workers were 7,996,116 officials, of whom 2,539,797 belonged to the top managerial category. In other words, one in three of them was a ‘boss’.[2]
Above this layer we find the very senior officials – some hundreds of people in charge of gigantic institutions. From another source we learn that around 1977 there were 32 USSR-level ministries (25 of them industrial) and 30 Union ministries that had equivalents at republican level (10 of them industrial).[3] To these must be added some 500 institutions that were referred to as ‘ministries’, but which were government agencies in the ‘autonomous’ republics – something important for the study of local elites, but not the topmost stratum.
Before the 1970 census, the figure of 8 million was generally given for the number of employees in state administration, 2.5 million of whom were described as nachal’niki (‘heads’). With the census, the picture changed to a more realistic total of 13 million, with some 4 million nachal’niki. The statisticians had rightly separated out another category: the members of the central ministerial core, who constituted the real ruling stratum. It involved six Union-level state committees (Science and Technology, International Trade, Meteorology, etc.), twelve committees with dual competence (Union and republics), and agencies like the KGB, Gosplan, the Central Statistical Office, the Finance Ministry, and so on. The officials who headed these institutions were all members of the central government.
1
However, helpful information can be found in the 1986 and 1995 editions of T. P. Korzhikhina,
2
RGAE, f. 1562, op. 47, d. 1896, LL. 1–47. These are the results of the census (